


Esme, at home

by silenth



Series: Time is what you make of it [6]
Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Edward is a mama's boy, Esme and her boys, F/M, mental health struggles, the struggle is real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:47:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29149941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silenth/pseuds/silenth
Summary: Esme wakes up in heaven, but sometimes it still feels like hell. TW: mental illness, mentions of suicide (canon), mentions of infant death (canon).
Relationships: Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen
Series: Time is what you make of it [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953487
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	Esme, at home

The Volturri's present arrived two months after Esme and Carlisle's wedding. It had been painted in the early 1700s by a man whose name was long ago lost to history. A tiny, delicate composition, it depicted a celestial scene high above the earth, light from the upper left corner beaming down on scattered flowers abandoned on a fluffy grayish white cloud. It appeared as though angels had flown out of the frame only seconds before, perhaps called down to help someone on Earth, and left the flowers behind.

Carlisle read Esme and Edward the letter from the Volturri; they wrote that it had hung in the home of a young nobleman, purchased for his beautiful and devoutly religious bride as a wedding gift. The small bronze plaque at the bottom of the frame read:

_The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork._

But when Esme peeked in the fine wooden box that had carried the painting across the ocean, she found another plaque, much more worn, lying in a corner.

"What's this?" she asked Carlisle, and he sighed.

"I had hoped you wouldn't see that. Apparently, the young man's bride did not survive to see their first anniversary." He went and sat next to her, taking her hand in his, and continued, "She died in childbirth, along with their first child. He had the original plaque removed and a new one installed. It remained there until the Volturri killed one of his descendants decades later, and claimed the painting for themselves. They had the original plaque reinstalled for our happy occasion." She turned the plaque over in her fingers, rubbing her fingers over the worn letters. "I'm sure Aro thought it an amusing anecdote, the miseries of these lives from so long ago."

Esme nodded and allowed Carlisle to remove the small piece of metal from her hands and place it aside. But she understood the devastation the nobleman must have felt when he had the plaques changed, the way the world could change so quickly, in the span of a single breath that doesn't come.

How hell is a world people wind up in, when a changeling nightmare assumes the place of the happy future they saw lying ahead of them.

_The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell dwells within myself._

Esme's hell had begun with her husband's violence, the loss of her sweet baby, her own limitless depression after he was gone. And when she woke up, not in hell, not in hell at all but in heaven, with Carlisle, her beautiful and glorious blessing, and with Edward, her tender-hearted dreamer, she found it so hard to accept that she had left that hell behind.

She worried that Edward would feel supplanted in Carlisle's affections (obviously much different than the way he felt for her, but they had been together, only the two of them, for so long). When she clumsily tried to tell him that she hoped he would remain with them, and not feel the need to leave, Edward smiled and took her hand before she could finish her sentence. "The best things come in threes," he told her. "You are my family now as much as Carlisle is."

That stayed in her mind, his kind turn of phrase. The best things come in threes. 

They had moved to a new home after her turning. Carlisle found a position working nights at a hospital and Edward would leave them to study music during the day. (They never bothered with high school then, being so much more nomadic than they were once their family grew.) 

One of them was always with her, there in their small cottage on the edge of the woods. After a few weeks, Carlisle was moved to the day shift, to cover the position for a doctor who had transferred to a new hospital. The day Carlisle hugged her goodbye and prepared to leave the house with Edward, he asked her again if she was sure she didn't want to come out with them. They could bring her to the library, to a museum, to a park since it was a cloudy day. "You don't have to stay in the house all day if you don't wish to," he told her gently, his hands so soft around her waist.

She kept her face very calm, said no with her sweet smile pinned in place. 

And when they left, her hidden thoughts were there waiting. She could not stop obsessing over the idea that they would never return, but she was equally afraid to leave the house to go to them. She was certain she would accidentally lose control and kill someone, or betray their secret by moving too fast or saying something incriminating. Perhaps a random ray of sunlight would hit her and make her sparkle. There were so many mistakes she could make. So many mistakes they could make. What would she do if they never came back to her? 

It was a spiraling sort of torture that visited the home when they were both gone. It was shy and only wished to see her. What good friends they would become.

Threes. The three of them. The past, the present, the future. The father, the son, the holy ghost. Tapping three times on every wall, every panel of glass in every window. She didn't stop for hours, she couldn't. 

Tap tap tap - every doorknob. Bring them home. Bring them back. Every tap, she would think those words, or say them, the line between her thoughts and actions so close she was unaware half the time if the words were real or only in her mind, or if the taps were becoming the words.

Tap tap tap - the spine of every book. She had failed once, she had lost. She had to atone for her sins, for her failures. She couldn't sleep now, perhaps that would keep her from failing again.

Tap tap tap - every side of every picture frame around the pieces of Carlisle's art that they had brought to this house. Threes to guarantee a happy future. Threes for _I love them, I love them._ How she loved them so. 

Tap tap tap - on the end of every pen. If she lost them, that would be the end for her and there was no cliff in this world to step off of. 

Tap tap tap - the countertop in the kitchen, the table. Three taps for her anxiety, for her fears, for everything she couldn't say but couldn't stop thinking. 

Tap tap tap, finger on fingerbone. Part of her sat at the table and watched her frantic circuit through their home. 

Tap tap tap - every lightswitch. _This doesn't make a difference,_ that part of her said. 

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap - every button on Carlisle's shirt in the closet. They can still disappear if you're not careful. If they're not at home with you, they're not safe. 

Tap tap tap - the soles of their shoes to save their souls and their hearts. Don't fall asleep and don't ever ever ever stop stop stop taptaptapping. 

By the time Edward and Carlisle got home, she wasn't sure how many circuits she had made. She knew she was doing them in threes and she was on the last one but she couldn't stop yet. They called for her and she heard them walking through their cottage, peering into rooms. The tapping seemed impossibly loud to her, but it took them a minute or two to find her. She was kneeling in the bathroom, doing the edges of the bathtub and the bottom and the faucets and the soap. 

"Sweetheart, darling," Carlisle sat on the edge of the tub but made no move to touch her. "Could I help you?"

She shook her head, her lips pressed tight together. "I'm almost done done done. I only have one room left and then I'll come out." She bit her lip but she had to finish. "Out out." She glanced at his face and saw that beautiful compassion and understanding in his eyes, how clear and pure they were. They were filled with the light that must shine in Heaven, like the light on the clouds in that painting. 

_I feel sometimes a hell dwells within myself._

She shuddered and turned away but he put his hand on her shoulder. "I'll leave you alone until you're finished, Esme. I love you." 

Esme had to tap through Edward's room and he stayed in the parlor until she was done. Part of her wondered what he must be thinking when he heard her thoughts, the repetition of all of her obsessive fears and failures. How she bails out the ocean with a thimble and tosses it on a raging fire. She doesn't know if her worries are the ocean or the fire -- if her need to tap, to count, to check and recheck is the fire or the ocean.

But Edward kept his own counsel, as he so often did. She never heard him utter a harsh word against her, or a critique of Carlisle for the mad woman he brought into their lives. Not once, in all the years that followed.

That night, she held herself stiff and still, sitting on the edge of their marital bed and Carlisle knelt in front of her, put his head on her thighs. "I love you so, May. Every day I thank God he allowed me to find you, at last." He only called her May when it was the two of them. 

"Carlisle," she melted and fell to the floor and crawled into him, messy and needy, her open mouth on his chest, his body underneath hers, right there on the rough wooden floor. 

"What are you going to do now?" she asked him much later. "Do you think me mad?"

They are lying on their sides, facing each other. She found so much peace in his eyes, in the way he studied her, as though she were truly the woman he believed her to be. "Of course not. I know how much pain you survived in your life. The mind will do anything to cope with pain, will go anywhere to escape it." He pulled her a little closer, ran his hand through her hair. He pulled her curls over her shoulder, scattered them over her bare skin, and she smiled at his obvious pleasure in her. "As for what I intend to do," he lifted himself over her, "I intend to love you with all the constancy in my soul, until you never doubt the depth of my affections. I believe what will help the most is the passage of time." 

"I don't believe I can ever feel truly safe unless you and Edward are here with me. I never want to leave this home." She whispered her fears against his lips and he rubbed his nose against hers.

"Then you never have to. We can stay here until the walls fall down around us. Though perhaps you can refinish the floors so we won't have so many splinters next time we make love on it?"

She had to smile at that. A better man than Carlisle had surely never existed. No one could love with such patience and tenderness.

As the days and months passed, she tapped and she cleaned. Not a mote of dust or dirt, a single germ, was allowed to find residence in their cottage. It always smelled of peppermint soap. Once she planted her first garden, she dried the rosemary into sachets and lined the drawers of their dressers with them, mixed a lemongrass solution to brush over the doorstop to keep away pests. 

Their time without Edward was the hardest. They left the home they had shared with him behind when he did, moving hundreds of miles away. Carlisle found her what he called "a project" for their new house. It had been a fine place once, but it had suffered years of neglect after its owners died. 

"Perhaps if I can make it beautiful again, one day Edward will return to us," she whispered to Carlisle on their first tour of their new home. She tapped on the walls as they walked along, wincing as she made notes of everything that was wrong. The floorboards were rotting, holes punched in the walls, loose tiles and missing fixtures in the bathrooms, scurrying small animals living in the walls and the attic, standing water in the basement. 

"We have to allow Edward his freedom," Carlisle said, "and trust that in time, the bonds between us will call him back."

But that house became her mission - the idea that she could call him back sooner if she could make him a proper home. She hammered and plastered and drained and repaired and painted and installed, aided by a series of endless books that Carlisle brought home from the library. Every day she found new pride in something she had done. Every day she felt her vision of Edward walking through the door growing clearer. How proud he would be to see the room she had made especially for him. 

She knew she had to be calm when he did return - it would only upset him if he knew how badly his leaving had hurt her, how it had screamed the names of the fears huddled in the secret chambers of her heart. 

Esme had already lost one son, and losing another was more than she could stand.

She had fallen asleep then, you see. 

She had labored for two full days and nights on the maternity ward in the hospital but when her son was finally born, she was so elated she didn't think she would ever sleep again. He was so perfect - his tiny fingernails. His knees, how they looked exactly like hers, on a pudgy newborn body. The whorls of his ears, the warmth of his smell. Every cell of him, so infinitely precious to her. She held him for what felt like a second, and then the nurse whisked him out of her arms, passed him to the doctor for examination.

There was a bad respiratory illness in the city at the time. She had already been exposed from some of the students at school, but they seemed more concerned about how it would affect her baby. He was quiet in their arms, but he wiggled his fingers, pursed his lips and tried to suckle.

They let her nurse him and she convinced herself that he was fine and healthy, that he would be strong and brave. She had tried to be brave, when she left his father. 

That was all Esme wanted for her boy - for him to be brave and kind and good and happy. She looked down at his pale shining face and saw an infinity of selves before him, the reflections of all the men he could be. 

She dreamed of the weight of his arms around her neck, the ease with which he would run into her arms, throw his weight against hers. His giggles and his sweet hot breath close on her face. 

All she had to do was keep picturing those things, keep imagining him growing taller and stronger, following her finger along the page of the Bible as she taught him to read, listening to his babbling stories when he understood how to tell her a narrative of his day, kissing the tip of his nose as she ladled oatmeal into his bowl for breakfast. 

She slept in snatches, her hand always on his back so she could dart awake the minute he squirmed or kicked out his foot. She squeezed her breast over his face when he seemed too tired to suckle, dropped her milk onto his tiny tongue, the almost-colorless pink shade of a newborn kitten's nose.

She whispered to him all of her dreams for him, the sights and the stories she couldn't wait to show him. She had gone through the Bible and written down all the kings' names, the good kings, for that was who she wanted her son to be. Someone who could affect the lives of others in a positive way - a David, an Asa, a Josiah, a Jotham. She was partial to David, had started mouthing that word when she watched him sleep. Her boy David. Davy would be sweet when he was a little one. Her little Davy.

There was another woman who had given birth on the ward the day before Esme, a woman two or three years younger. Her baby was a girl, and she was born warm from the woman's body, but she never drew a single breath. A perfect, tiny baby, without a single flaw, except that she never lived in this world.

Esme had cried for the mother then, cried harder than the woman herself - Lolly was her name, she seemed in shock, or perhaps just exhausted. She had three other children at home, two boys and a girl, and coming to the hospital to give birth was as close as she came to a day of rest. 

When Esme woke up and saw her baby, her almost David, in his small crib next to her bed, saw his stillness, the way he no longer arched his back to breathe, felt the coolness of him under her fingers, she hated Lolly. Lolly had other children, and a husband. 

Esme had only her baby, one she had never named. One who died while she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, who had slipped from her grasp like a smooth stone dropping back into the sea. 

When Edward finally returned, she tried not to overwhelm him with her gratitude. But when he spoke of the things he had done in the time he had been away, the men he had killed, she couldn't help it. 

_I would forgive you anything for coming back to us, Edward. If you killed bad people, if you killed saints or angels or God himself, any sin you could imagine - I only wished for you to come home._

Edward had hugged her then, sighed his disgust with himself, with the pain he had caused them, into her hair and clutched her as tightly as he could. "I love you, Esme," he whispered, and she heard the whisper of her baby's breath in his words, the way he had looked into her eyes in those two days, as though he knew her voice from all the dark hours he floated inside her. The son she had tried to keep safe and failed, and the one who had returned to her at last. 

"I love you, Edward," she whispered back, brushing her hand over his hair. 

The years that came brought her so much joy she wanted to pinch herself sometimes. Another daughter, another son, and then finally, the surprise of two at once, Alice and Jasper, strange and gifted and so linked she always thought of them as twins, even after Jasper and Rosalie started playing the Hale twins. 

By then her tapping and checking, counting and cleaning, only reared its head when they left one home for the next. She had to circle the house seven times, for her five children and Carlisle and herself, looking under every bed, on every shelf in every cupboard and closet, to make certain they weren't leaving anything behind. Adjusting the sheets drawn over the furniture they were leaving behind, making sure the house was shut up tight, protected against the elements. They had caretakers visit their properties, since it would be decades before they could return for more than a brief visit, but leaving these places behind was always, to Esme, like abandoning a cherished friend. She spent more time in them than anyone else, and she put more of herself into making their houses into homes. 

The first time they moved with Jasper and Alice, it was sudden, spurred by Jasper losing control and killing someone. As everyone packed up their belongings, Esme fretted silently over the renovation of Jasper and Alice's bedroom, which she was leaving only half-finished. She was never finished, always working on something - building or refinishing or redecorating. It kept her more than occupied in the hours when she was home alone.

She was checking Edward's room for the fourth time, listening to them talking in the big room right below this one on the first floor. It had been intended as a formal dining room, and indeed they did have a large table in it, polished by Esme on a weekly basis to a mirror gleam, but it also had Edward's piano and Emmett's latest obsession, his beloved billiard table.

He and Jasper were playing billiards now, blindfolded, and Emmett barely gloated at all when he won. "You know what I want to learn about next?" he asked, his voice filled with that quicksilver passion that took him over when he got absorbed in a new idea.

Esme smiled as she crawled underneath the bedframe Edward was leaving behind, patting her hand in the dark to make sure he wasn't leaving behind a scrap of paper or a forgotten sock. In all the years she had loved Emmett, only his passion for Rosalie and for physical activity had remained consistent (and for physical activity with Rosalie, of course).

Alice started giggling before Emmett posed his question - she always laughed before the answer or the punchline, it was one of her most charming quirks. 

"Irish stepdance!" Emmett declared. "Roses, remember those guys we saw performing on the corner in Boston? I could do that!" 

"Saints preserve us," Alice choked out, in a perfect Irish accent. 

Esme paused for a moment, listening to Rosalie and Emmett debate the merits of traditional Irish dancing as opposed to other cultures, and then she leaned her head out of the door of Edward's room and yelled down the stairs. "Emmett dear, please don't start practicing it now, I only just waxed the floors down there!" 

The pounding and stomping rattling the glass and indeed the very frame of the house stopped abruptly.

"Sorry, Esme!" His voice echoed back, contrite.

"I'm almost finished," she called again, moving to Carlisle's study. Only two more complete circuits. She could almost feel Emmett's antsiness - he was the most impatient of all of them, so loving and funny, but he hated waiting and she felt a stab of guilt that she still had to do this every time they left a place.

But it was the only way she felt their safety was guaranteed. Everything she checked, every cautionary tap tap tap on the wall of a mostly-empty room or a freshly scrubbed window, was a guarantee that they would make it to their new home safe and well. That no one would leave her, that their love for her would remain as strong as her love for them.

When she turned from her inspection and tap tap tap of all Carlisle's empty shelves - they never left books behind, their books were too dear to all of them - she startled to see Jasper standing in the doorway. 

She realized she had felt him before she saw him - that wave of guilt, she could feel it circling in the air around him. 

"I'm sorry," he blurted abruptly, and she frowned. It was his slip that made her leave, but she had reassured him, each of them had, that they didn't care about an abrupt departure. 

"It happens to all of us at one point," Emmett said pragmatically, and then added, "Except for Carlisle, of course."

Carlisle had gone ahead to find her a new project, since he knew best what she wanted. A large neglected home near the woods, where she could have her garden. It had to have walls and roof to provide shelter from the sun, but other than that, the more damage, the better. She would have it gleaming and gorgeous soon enough.

"Sorry for what, dear?" Esme asked, walking over to the window to pull up the shade and tap tap tap the glass, check the lock, then pull the shade down again.

He watched her with a sharp-edged gaze, flinching a little as she tapped her nails. 

"Alice said before us, you only had to do this five times." His hands gripped each other, holding on tight and twisting. "I apologize for making you leave in the middle of fixing up our room and for the extra--" He jutted his chin at her, to encompass everything he has watched her do, and then he extended his neck, pushing his shoulders down, like he's pleased to have finally made his amends. 

"Oh Jasper." Esme moved to the closet, flicking the light three times before she checked the shelves and the floor, then flicking it off and tapping the door three times as she closed it "I suppose this must seem very strange to you, doesn't it? It is strange, I admit, but I hope you can become used to it in time--"

"I don't mind it," he interrupted. "Well, I don't like the sound of the tapping," he admitted, looking away, "but the rituals, I don't mind, we all have things, I suppose, that is--" He looked like he hadn't meant to admit to that, and quickly brushed it aside. "Alice says they make you happy, that they're like good luck charms. It seems like quite a lot of work," he said, as she pulled the sheet off Carlisle's desk and began to check the drawers and cubbies, the secret hiding places, for anything he might have left behind. 

"I used to do these things every day, over and over and over," she admitted shyly and Jasper nodded slowly. "It wasn't so much that they made me happy then-- but I couldn't not do it. It was a compulsion, I suppose. Carlisle told me then that time would help, and love. And he gave me those things, time and love, and they helped more than I would have believed at first." His face was shadowed, her newest son's, and his fingers traced the scars on the backs of his hands, though she didn't think he was aware that he did it. 

"I took my eccentricities and I tried to turn them into beautiful things, into homes for my family. Into labors of love, Jasper. That's what all of this is for, as elaborate as it seems, a little offering and a prayer that our family will be as happy in the next place as we were in this one."

She closed up the desk and pulled the sheet down over it, then walked to him and extended her hand. "I would do a hundred times more for us, if I could, but I'm afraid this is all I have to offer."

"Only the happiest homes we could imagine, you mean," Edward spoke up from the doorway, a tender smile on his face. "Better ones than most of us deserve."

She glanced from her first son to her newest. My sweet boys, her soul throbbed, taking a moment to remember the hopes she had dreamt for her almost Davy. How she wanted him to be brave and strong, a kind-hearted king who would leave goodness behind him. 

"We have been happy here," Jasper said, an admission tantamount to a screaming vow of devotion from anyone else. 

"Carlisle is the strong hand on the rein holding us together, but you're the one we stay together for. Everything you hoped for Him, you have achieved for yourself - the goodness you have left behind you," Edward told her, his eyes fervent and burning when he studied her face.

"You make the house a home," Emmett crooned up the stairs, and Esme blinked hard, pressed her hands to her cheeks and beamed into her fingers.

"Oh, leave me be now!" She fluttered her fingers until they walked away, Edward pausing to let Jasper catch up to him. 

Small dreams for her smallest son's life, and she would spend her eternity watching her family make those dreams come true.

**Author's Note:**

> "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork."  
> Book of Psalms, 19:1
> 
> "The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself."  
> Thomas Browne  
> Section 51 - Religio Medici (1642) - Part I


End file.
